Hatched by Bruce Coville

My name is Gerald, and I'm a griffin. You know, eagle head and wings with the body of a lion. I'll bring shame to my family if I don't find my tenth treasure within the next two weeks, so I've decided to run away. My teacher, a gnome, actually tricked me into entering the human world, so he could find his twin brother in New Batavia, a lost colony of gnomes. I've entered a forbidden world, let a human see me, and I still have no idea how I'm going to get my tenth treasure. I can never return to the Enchanted Realm without it. What else can go wrong? How about all of the gnomes in New Batavia are going to be killed?

The idea of having an insecure griffin as the main character, and his teacher being a gnome, was very creative. The theme was a familiar one, as Gerald needed to learn to have confidence in himself. I don't normally like plots that are told from more than two points of view, and this book bugged me in that way. However, I finally got used to it and most of the views came from Gerald and Brad, his new human friend. Brad was an underachieving student, and his grandmother was a leader in protecting the gnomes. There was a balance between humans and gnomes. The gnomes helped the humans magically (they had saved Brad's life the summer before), and humans helped keep the gnomes secret. The author, Bruce Coville, also wrote the My Teacher is an Alien series, and this book seems to be the first in a new winning series.